


Five Girls Annie Almost Kissed and One She Did

by notfelix



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, Annie-Centric, Annie/Britta - Freeform, Annie/Jeff - Freeform, Annie/OFC(s), Annie/OMC, Annie/Vaughn, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Community Appreciation Week 2017, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Lesbian Character, Non-Explicit Sex, Pining, Substance Abuse, compulsory heterosexuality, dialogue lifted directly from canon, holy crap my dudes I spent so much time making sure this was all canon compliant, other pairings include:, situations adapted from author's own life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-25 03:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10755684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notfelix/pseuds/notfelix
Summary: "Annie Edison likes boys. She knows this to be true."Written for Community Appreciation Week 2017.





	Five Girls Annie Almost Kissed and One She Did

**Author's Note:**

> Community Appreciation Week 2017 -- Day Five: 5+1 Fic
> 
> Follows Annie from middle school through the beginning of season 3. As canon-compliant as I could possibly make it. I think there are only two things I left out (that I know of), and only one of them was intentional.
> 
> The "substance abuse" tag refers to Annie's Adderall addiction.
> 
> She also experiences a TON of internalized homophobia and spends the majority of the fic wrestling with compulsory heterosexuality. My apologies if it gets painful to read.
> 
> Unbeta'd, so any mistakes are mine to bear alone.

One.

Annie Edison likes boys. She knows this to be true and yet she finds herself actively thinking it more than she suspects other girls do. She thinks this mostly in relation to that dream she had had a year ago that she hasn’t been able to shake, the one where Nina Delaney (the vicious, sharp-edged blonde who has decided, somehow, that out of everyone in their entire middle school, Annie gets the privilege of being her best— perhaps her only?— friend) admits that she’s in love with her. It isn’t true, of course, because Nina doesn’t like girls (or boys, or anyone, really; she doesn’t like anyone, not romantically, not even at all), and even if it _were_ true, Annie would turn her down, because Annie likes boys. They’d still be friends, of course, because Annie isn’t some homophobic monster who would push away the most fascinating person she knows just because of a _crush_. Everything would be exactly the same, actually, as it is now— who knows? maybe Nina already does have a crush on her— except that Annie would _relish_ it: no, John, I don’t care that you like Carly more than me, because I made _Nina_ fall in love with me, and she is so much cooler than you. (And this is how she knows that she likes boys: this is important, and she’s already told everyone in Pre-Algebra that she likes John, and that he broke her heart, and once it’s known there’s no longer any question of its truth.) So, no, Annie isn’t a lesbian, but she thinks about that dream biweekly. If Nina had a crush on her… well, wouldn’t that be something?

Anyway, Annie hopes she’ll get to be in Nina’s class again next year. Eighth grade would totally suck without her.

Nina lives across the street from the town pool, atop the big hill that boasts the most popular sledding spot when winter rolls around. In the summers, though, balmy June teasing the end of school (just days left, now, so few she can count them on her fingers), Annie and Nina spend innumerable and unknowable hours wearing grass stains into a clichéd gingham blanket, people-watching over a picnic of Goldfish and Gushers. They laugh that they’re morally superior to the girls in their classes who shriek their mirth so everyone can hear that they’re having fun, who laze their days poolside, who show off their bikinis every opportunity they get. Annie never admits that if she could— if her parents would let her— she’d show off a bikini, too, buy one just to ask Nina’s opinion; her abstention from two-pieces is some combination of being not in need of attention from boys, self-consciousness, and parental conservatism, rather than merely the former.

It’s Saturday, so Annie’s mom lets her sleep over, and Nina’s parents let them stay outside past ten since they’re well within sight of the house (convenient for bathroom breaks and snack refills). They remain perched at their post long enough to watch the pool close for the evening, to watch the sun melt pink into night, to count the stars as they wink into life, to feel the temperature drop a good ten degrees. Annie had taken off her cardigan well before noon, warm enough in just her sundress, but now that the exceptional heat has waned and she’s no longer acclimated to more moderate temperatures, she puts it back on. Well, she begins to, anyway— she gets one arm through before she notices the skin on Nina’s arms pebble, the short blonde hairs standing on end (and Annie’s always been jealous of this, body hair so translucent it garners no attention, where Annie comes from a long line of hairy Jewish women and still isn’t sure if she’s supposed to shave her arms or not). She doesn’t really think anything, just sort of watches herself like from outside of her body, as she pulls her arm back out of the sleeve and drapes the cardigan instead around Nina’s shoulders.

Nina looks down at her own arms before at Annie, and when she eventually turns her head she has one eyebrow raised.

“All right, Romeo. You’re not gonna kiss me now, are you?”

She’s grinning because she knows how funny this all is, how like some PG-13 ‘80s movie wherein Annie is the chivalrous football player lending her letterman jacket to unlikely nerdy girl Nina, and because she’s grinning Annie laughs.

“You wish, Juliet.”

Nina rolls her eyes. She turns her attention back towards the sky: “Y’know, I know it’s just a TV show, but I really think The X-Files is real. I mean, like, the more I look at space the more I’m certain there’s just no way we’re the only ones…”

She continues talking, but Annie stops listening— unintentionally, of course, because Nina could narrate the encyclopedia and Annie would listen, rapt. It’s just that Annie’s thinking about that dream again, and chewing on her lip, and wondering what it would be like if they _were_ the only ones.

* * *

Two.

Bar mitzvah season is exhausting. Drew Silverberg’s reception is at the country club in the wealthy part of town, and there’s only so many poorly-censored pop songs Annie can dance to and hors d’oeurves she can eat before she needs a break.

She manages to meet Michaela Levy’s eyes across the dance floor (of all the kids in their Hebrew School class, Michaela is the most reliably introverted and the most plainly uncomfortable with performative celebration), and in a routine nearly perfected after four months of b’nai mitzvah every single Saturday, they break away from their respective circles and head for the ladies’ room.

Michaela’s already there, splashing water on her face, when Annie walks in. (Annie had swung back to her table momentarily to swipe the purse she borrowed from her mother.) Annie catches the heavy door with her hand just before it closes so it won’t make a sound; aside from the rush of the faucet, it’s so quiet in here, so quiet she can finally breathe, and why would she willingly give this away? Michaela shuts the sink and pats her face dry with a paper towel.

“Do you have any chapstick I can borrow?”

Annie unzips her purse and hands Michaela a small, glittery tube: marshmallow-flavored LipSmackers.

“Thanks,” Michaela says, and she takes the stick and she runs it across her lips (and Annie watches the motion the entire time, unblinking, breathing so shallowly she can forget that she even exists). Michaela gives it back; Annie drops it back into the purse as quickly as she can, so it doesn’t have a chance to burn her.

Michaela sighs a long, groaning sigh. Annie exhales.

“I’m so not looking forward to this,” Michaela says. She walks over to the far side of the bathroom and slides down the wall to sit on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. She’s wearing shorts under her dress.

Annie follows her, tucking her legs up under herself, picking at a run in her tights (when did that get there?). “Tell me about it,” she says. “I can’t wait to not have to practice haftarah for two hours every day.”

At this Michaela laughs, and the sound bounces off of the linoleum.

“Who’s left?” she asks. “There’s Jake next week, right? And then Rebecca, then you, then me… I’m not last, am I? There’s somebody after me.”

Annie nods. She runs through the list in her head: “Jake, Rebecca, me, you, Ben.” She frowns. “Wait. Ben hasn’t gone yet, right? Oh, my gosh, am I completely forgetting Ben’s?”

They sit in quiet for a moment before Michaela confirms, “No, no, you’re right. Ben’s after me. And then we’re free! Finally.”

“It’ll be weird not seeing everybody at Hebrew School every week anymore. I mean, most of us will be in high school together next year, but it won’t be the same. Our group is splitting up.” Annie chews on the nail of her thumb and tries not to imagine her mother reprimanding her for chipping the polish.

“I’m not gonna miss it. It’s not even over yet and I already don’t miss it.”

“Everyone will say that we’ll all still hang out but that won’t actually happen.”

“Annie. Chill.”

Michaela scoots over to sit cross-legged in front of Annie. She puts her hand on Annie’s shoulder; Annie keeps biting her nail.

“You can’t possibly like these people so much that not talking about the Talmud once a week is going to make your life significantly worse. I mean, you have other friends, right?”

One of Michaela’s eyelashes falls out onto her cheek.

“… You _do_ have other friends, right? Annie?”

Annie picks the eyelash from Michaela’s face. She holds it up between two fingers. She says, “Make a wish.”

Michaela looks at the eyelash, and then at Annie. “C’mon,” she grunts, pushing to her feet. “We’re gonna miss the cake.”

* * *

Three.

Troy Barnes is beautiful and charismatic, so it makes all the sense in the world that Annie would have a crush on him. He’s popular and he plays football and Annie’s parents let her put off getting braces until after her bat mitzvah, so she _started_ high school with them while everyone else she knows had them removed at the start of high school (contacts, though, still elude her), and she’s seen more than enough movies to know that girls like her are _destined_ to end up with boys like Troy, even if it’s a long and merciless road to get there.

She doesn’t even have a class with him, but seeing him in the hallway makes her stomach churn with the same sort of anxious dread that calculus gives her, and she _likes_ calculus, so she must like Troy, too. (Never mind that she likes calculus because she’s good at it and because it keeps her busy so she doesn’t have the time or expendable brain power to feel _lonely_.) Troy is Annie’s opposite in every conceivable way: she has a history of awe towards people who are so unlike herself, and why should Troy be any different? She flinches in the halls when his friends slam their locker doors, buries her face in her books when he passes, forges doctors’ notes to get out of Phys Ed so he can never see her literally or metaphorically sweat. This may not necessarily help jumpstart the whole getting-Troy-to-fall-in-love-with-her mission (even though it’s not _supposed_ to require visible effort— rather, it should serendipitously fall into both of their laps), but Annie decides not to worry about it. She’s only a junior; she still has plenty of time for a picture-perfect high school experience.

Annie eats lunch in Mr Khan’s classroom, as she has every day since the football team pelted her with apple cores and half-empty milk cartons in the cafeteria three months into freshman year. Annie likes this classroom; it’s where the Academic Decathlon team meets every Thursday after school; it’s a room covered in charts and graph paper and chalk dust and desks in pristine rows; it’s a room with no flickering lights, which separates it from an unfortunate majority of classrooms in this school.

Annie’s the only junior on the Academic Decathlon team— the only non-senior, really— so unless there are suddenly eight new freshmen next year interested in joining, the team will end when this year’s seniors graduate. She can’t help but be upset that the Civil War is the hill her politically-conservative high school is going to die on; history isn’t Annie’s particular specialty, but she can’t quite trust students at a school whose fight song is literally “Your team’s Al Gore ‘cause your views are wrong” to gracefully handle slavery, and, well, she’d really like one more year to leave behind a slightly better legacy for the dying team.

She doesn’t voice these concerns at today’s practice, but they do make it a little difficult to pay attention. The hour passes sooner than she expects (and they only get an hour because neither Mr Khan nor the custodians get paid overtime for keeping the building open late). Marisol de la Garza drives Annie home in her beat-up 1998 Honda minivan, like she always does (Annie’s not allowed to walk home anymore, not when all the crossing guards in a half-mile radius have been paid off to lure her into getting hit). They pull into Annie’s driveway; Annie thanks her for the ride, again, and digs through her backpack for her keys— which aren’t there. At least, they’re not in the pocket she usually puts them in. With a confused huff, Annie removes her backpack, unzips all the pockets, combs through all her belongings for just one small, silver key on a fuzzy, purple keychain, and comes up with nothing.

Marisol rolls down her window. “Everything okay?” she calls.

Annie furrows her eyebrows and shouts back, “I can’t find my keys. Hold on, let me call my brother.”

She locates her phone— a refurbished black Motorola Razr (she couldn’t afford an iPhone, especially not since she had just spent her birthday money on an iPod Touch)— and punches in Anthony’s number. It rings for a few glacial seconds, and she lets out an anguished scream when she meets his voicemail. Annie takes a moment to collect herself before zipping up her backpack and returning to Marisol’s car.

“I’m locked out,” she spits, slamming the passenger-side door closed and her seatbelt into its buckle.

Marisol looks at Annie, then at the dashboard clock, then she sighs and turns the key in the ignition. “All right, you can come over to my house until your parents get home.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t sweat it.”

The drive to Marisol’s house is short and quiet but the house itself is warm and full, her younger siblings sprawled out in front of the television, half-introductions hastily shouted to her mother as they make their way upstairs (“My friend Annie is here!” / “Is she staying for dinner?” / “Probably not,”). Marisol’s room is bathed in a soft yellow glow from the reams of little string lights draped across the walls. Marisol flings both her backpack and her body onto the green bedspread; Annie takes the seat at her vanity. Without really thinking about it, she starts sifting through the various hair and makeup accoutrements cluttering the table: she opens eyeshadow palettes just to look at the colors, twists tubes of lipstick open and then closed, unwraps and rewraps the cord wound around Marisol’s hefty straightener four times in succession. She runs her thumbs on the cool ceramic plates, toggles the on/off switch. It is so benign in her hands, dormant; she feels somehow unworthy of the power she might wield should she plug it in.

“You can use it if you want. I don’t mind.”

Annie whips her head around to find Marisol lying on her side, her head propped up on her elbow, and she blushes the same way she blushes when she watches HBO with her brother, like she’s been caught doing something illicit and even the permission to continue won’t alleviate her shame at having transgressed some boundary.

“Oh, no, that’s— that’s okay, I was just looking,” she stammers.

“You sure?” Marisol asks. “You’d look nice with straight hair.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Here, I’ll help you.” Marisol pushes up from the mattress, stretching her arms out as she crosses the room to take the straightener from Annie’s hands.

With nothing to occupy them now, Annie’s fingers turn instead to fidget with the ends of her hair, her big, wild curls, her distinctive mane. She looks at herself in the mirror and tries to imagine a world in which she takes up less space. “Would straightening my hair be some expression of, like, internalized antisemitism?”

Marisol frowns as she resurfaces from plugging the cord into the wall. “What are you talking about? Plenty of Jewish girls have straight hair.”

“No, no, I know that,” Annie says, “I just meant that— well, I’m certainly not the first Jewish woman who’s ever been teased for having curly hair, and I’m wondering if assimilating is like letting my oppressors win, instead of embracing a facet of my appearance that visibly marks me as a member of a marginalized group.”

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to…”

“Oh, no, I still want to! It was just a thought.”

A beat passes, and then Marisol gives her a gentle smile in the mirror. “Your ancestors will forgive you,” she says. “And, besides, I feel like doing whatever you need to do to survive is pretty fucking Jewish as it is. If you gotta straighten your hair to survive high school…” She shrugs.

Annie considers this, and she says, “Okay,” and they wait for the iron to heat up. Eventually Marisol pulls Annie’s glasses from her face. A purple iPod Nano in a dock on the other side of the room shuffles through old Elvis Costello albums while they set to work.

Annie doesn’t recognize herself by the time it’s all done, and that thought makes her grotesquely happy. She puts her glasses back on, but the act feels incongruous with her new face, and she starts to think it might be time to renegotiate getting contacts.

“Look, Miss Elphaba,” Marisol grins, “you’re beautiful.”

“A real _Princess Diaries_ moment, huh?”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel… good. I feel really good.”

“Good.” Marisol checks her watch. “Let’s see about getting you home.”

* * *

Four.

Annie’s wound up so tight she might burst.

Between SATs and AP tests and college applications and her parents breathing down her neck and Troy fucking Barnes plastering his face on every available shred of wall, locker, and ceiling in his campaign for Homecoming King, there’s barely space for Annie to _breathe_ , let alone think or focus. She can’t even sit down to do homework without losing all thought to the mountains of other work she needs to somehow also be doing at the exact same moment. She needs six more arms. She needs six more brains.

She overhears Portia Nguyen-Fleming in Study Hall negotiate the sale of what she refers to as “study aids,” which Annie is certain is code for “drugs,” but at this point she’s desperate enough that she’s willing to try just about anything, really, anything that’ll help. She begins to formulate an elaborate plan for how she’ll discreetly get Portia’s attention, builds a whole lexicon of euphemisms so nobody will find out, workshops the lies she’ll tell her parents about where her allowance money has gone—and suddenly the bell is ringing, and Study Hall is over, and Annie’s Biology homework is still unfinished because she wasted forty minutes thinking about how to obtain _drugs_ (when did she become a delinquent?), and she _needed_ those forty minutes, and… Oy vey.

The opportunity presents itself sooner than Annie anticipates: it’s only the very next Thursday when Portia leaves her European history textbook in Study Hall. Annie is all too aware how expensive and, frankly, embarrassing it is to have to replace a lost textbook (it is a threat looming constantly over her; she quadruple-checks her backpack before leaving every class), so it only makes sense that Portia should want it back, and if Annie has to give it to her, well… So Annie puts the book with the rest of her own, and nearly falls over when she puts her backpack on. It takes her a few seconds to adjust to the added weight. She starts to think she might just need a back brace when all this is done. Great, another anxiety to add to the pile.

The first thing Annie does when she gets home is open up Facebook. She really ought to go straight to homework (she has to finish _The Metamorphoses_ by third period tomorrow, and she’s only on Book Twelve), but she’s got to let Portia know she has her book, and if she accidentally spends fifteen minutes clicking through all of Portia’s profile pictures, well, it isn’t Annie’s fault Portia’s makeup is so good and her house is so well-lit.

Anyway, Annie sends her a friend request and a message, and then she sets to reading, and she has to turn her computer completely off before she can overcome the urge to refresh the page every minute until she gets a response. It doesn’t help that with every line of Ovid she consumes, she thinks about how much easier all this will be once she talks to Portia about getting those “study aids.” It gets so bad that she thinks about turning her computer back on to read the SparkNotes because she just cannot absorb another word written in verse, but then that would be _cheating_ , and the shame she feels at having even considered it is enough to propel her through the rest of the book.

Portia doesn’t respond ‘til past midnight, so it’s a good thing Annie stayed up to work on her supplemental essays for CU Denver (she finished her Boulder and Stanford ones last week, thankfully; not that she’ll get into Stanford, of course, because if she can’t even sit through two hundred pages of Ovid _how_ could she possibly be cut out for _Stanford_? And that’s not even to mention all the schools further east than Missouri that she isn’t even applying to. Sometimes Annie thinks she might really love going somewhere more like Colorado College, somewhere small— but a liberal arts school isn’t going to have a Hospital Administration program, and she isn’t going to waste four whole years and all that money on some Art History degree she’ll never use). They arrange the return of the book at Study Hall; before she goes to bed, Annie carefully pens a note on a piece of scrap paper ( _I’ve heard you’re the one to speak to about procuring “study aids,”_ and her phone number), which she tucks into the front cover of the book. Finally, when Denver knows that her biggest regret is losing the Academic Decathlon three years in a row and her gut twists with paranoia regarding tomorrow’s exchange, she turns off the light and tries to sleep.

The trade itself is fairly uneventful: Annie hands over the book, Portia says, “Thanks,” then Annie returns to her desk and very deliberately does not look in Portia’s direction for the rest of the period. It’s hard not to spend the whole rest of the day wondering what she’ll do if Portia never opens the textbook, never sees her note, never divines that Annie has this voracious need to get right, but AP Calc is demanding, and she is so grateful for its rigor.

A pattern establishes itself: at precisely midnight, Facebook pings with a message from Portia: _maple st underpass. 3:30. cash_. Five words, and Annie just cannot fall asleep.

Annie counts the seconds as they tick down to 3:05, her teeth worrying at her lip (in time a canker sore will bloom), and she bolts from her seat with embarrassing enthusiasm the moment the bell rings. In a previous life, Annie Edison held firm in her belief that _the teacher dismisses her, not the bell_ , but Mr Khan is understanding, and, well, the Maple Street underpass is six blocks away, and she has to go out of her way to avoid the crossing guards who have no qualms about endangering her life.

She arrives at the darkened patch of sidewalk beneath the train tracks at 3:34, blisters already bubbling on her feet (ballet flats were a poor choice). Portia slides her phone into her pocket when Annie approaches.

“Thought you wouldn’t show,” Portia says, coolly examining a chip in her green nail polish.

Annie tries her very hardest not to get flustered; she falls just short of the finish line. “I, um, I had to— I had to take the long route.”

“Mhm.”

Annie waits a few awkward seconds (though Portia doesn’t look awkward at all; this is standard for her, probably, where Annie feels like her skin is too small for her body) before she pulls her backpack off of one shoulder and swings it around so she can fetch her wallet from the front pocket.

“How much do I—”

“Three hundred.”

Annie balks. “ _Three hundred dollars_?”

“Ya.”

A silent moment passes before Portia finally looks at Annie.

“It’s ten per. That’s three hundo for a month. Unless you wanna do it by the day. A little Study Hall snack.”

Annie blushes, a bit, her teeth sinking into her lip, already so acquainted with the shame of being mocked that she welcomes it like an old friend: of course, of course, this is how it always goes, this is how it’s meant to go, and how stupid could she be to think for a second that a girl like Portia would be _kind_ to her? She takes a couple measured breaths.

“Can— Can we do two weeks?”

Portia rolls her eyes, but she says, “Sure,” and she takes two Ziploc bags out of her backpack (one full of unmarked pills, the other empty). She thrusts her hand into the full bag, counts out precisely fourteen pills as they fall into the empty one. “All right. One-forty.”

Annie reaches for the bag; Portia holds it above her own head.

“Money first.”

Annie sighs, but ultimately it isn’t up to her, so she pulls the appropriate tender from her wallet, and as she peels out bills a car passes— only, it doesn’t pass. It slows as it approaches, and Troy Barnes leans his entire torso out of the passenger-side window.

“Hey, P!” He calls.

Portia grins, Adderall still held aloft. “T-Bone.”

As quickly as she can, her whole body flushed with panic, Annie shoves a handful of crumpled bills into Portia’s chest, snatches the bag from her hand, and all but runs away from the scene. As she goes, she hears something like, “Kyle’s throwing down tonight, you in?” and something like, “Wait and see,” and then she turns a corner and she’s too far away to make out anything more, and she’s halfway home before she even realizes she’s crying.

Anyway, Adderall is a revelation.

Two weeks passes far too quickly. Annie’s up at midnight on Thursday, staring at that last little pill in between calculus problems, when she receives a Facebook message from Portia: _rager, my place, 10:30. swing by, I’ll top u up_.

Annie responds in the affirmative, and, already neck-deep in things she cannot handle, the ocean floor gives out, and new, unspeakable nightmares ascend.

The last seven parties Annie’s been invited to have been b’nai mitzvah, and the bulk of those were four years ago. She’s out of her depth. Anthony’s no help picking out the right outfit, but he does drop her off, and he promises not to tell Mom and Dad if she drinks. She assures him that she won’t, but, really, she kind of feels like she can’t be held accountable for anything that happens tonight. If it takes a Solo cup full of lukewarm beer for her to survive, well, at the very least she is going to make it out of this house alive— alive and, hopefully, with two more weeks’ worth of her new best friend.

It’s dark and loud and crowded in the Nguyen-Fleming residence. Annie feels so out-of-place here, foreign in her floral dress and cardigan, nervous and hot (hotter than she should be for early November) and immediately overwhelmed. She keeps her head down, pushes through throngs of sweaty, half-dressed teenagers, glances up occasionally to scan the room for Portia and, when no such host is found, continues into the kitchen.

It’s less crowded in here, blessedly. Annie is fully able to stop and take stock of the room: the beer pong set up on the table, the six-foot jocks laughing around the keg (shirtless under their letterman jackets; they’re a caricature of themselves), the continued dearth of anyone who could be mistaken for Portia. Without really thinking about it she lets out a frustrated huff, and this gets the attention of more than one person she’d prefer would continue to ignore her. One such boy— the one losing at beer pong with his back to her— looks over his shoulder to track what has distracted his opponent. He screws his face up in confusion.

“ _Annie_?”

Drew Silverberg is a lot taller than he was in his ill-fitting suit and dress shoes at his bar mitzvah. Annie blinks at him a couple times as the recognition sets in. His hair is longer, too; he has to brush it out of his eyes.

“Drew! Hi. Wow, it’s— It’s been a long time, huh?”

Small talk is not Annie’s forte, and with all these eyes on her she’s afraid her voice will break.

Beer pong boy rolls his eyes and raps his knuckles on the table. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Drew waves him off. “Nah, I forfeit. You win.” He turns his body to face Annie head-on, and she is dwarfed by his presence. “I never really pegged you as the party type. I seem to remember you running out on a lot of bar mitzvahs.”

“Yeah,” she chuckles nervously, “I’m not, really. Um. Portia invited me.”

This seems to surprise him; in fairness, it continues to surprise Annie, too. “You and Portia are friends?”

“We’re… newly acquainted. Have you seen her around recently, by the way?”

He shakes his head. “Last I saw, she was outside, but that was ages ago.”

“Okay.” Annie exhales, nodding. “Thanks.”

She turns to exit through the open back door into the sprawling yard when suddenly there’s a hand on her shoulder.

“I could help you look for her, if you want?”

“Oh! That— That would be great. Thank you.”

He smiles, so she smiles. They cross the blue tiled floor and step into the even bluer night.

They find Portia in neither the hot tub nor the treehouse (“Why does she have a treehouse?” / “Her brother’s six. I’m his English tutor, that’s the only reason I was invited,”). They find her neither in the basement nor on the first floor, nor on the second floor, nor on the third. It takes forty-five minutes but they finally find her in the attic, Drew having pulled the stairs down from the latch in the ceiling, Troy Barnes slurping tequila from her belly button. Portia pushes Troy off of her when Drew and Annie enter, and she leads them down to her bedroom, where she and Annie trade bills for pills with not so much as a single word, but, rather, a series of judgmental and sheepish looks.

Her quest completed, wiry shadow trailing behind her, Annie barrels her way through the labyrinthine behemoth of a house. This whole atmosphere is oppressive: the thought of the front door swinging wide and releasing her to the world is the only thing holding a full-on panic attack at bay.

Drew follows her outside, which she doesn’t realize until it happens that she hadn’t expected. She sits down on the curb and he sits, too, a whole six inches between them and yet he still feels entirely too close. Annie gets halfway through a text asking Anthony to pick her up before Drew asks her if she’d like to go get a slice of pizza. He offers to drop her home afterwards. He smiles at her. She accepts.

She finds herself thinking that, alongside scores of movies wherein boys like Troy Barnes wake up one day to realize the one thing they’ve been missing is a girl like Annie, there’s a whole subgenre solely dedicated to stories about girls like Annie chasing after boys like Troy only to realize that they’re _really_ meant to be with boys like Drew who have been sitting six inches away, secretly in love the entire time. The pizza is fine. Drew is just as awkward as Annie is. He sends her a friend request on Facebook when he gets home.

Eventually Annie starts eating lunch with Drew and his friends— perfectly fine boys in Film Club, because Drama Club is just too gay (but only just); eventually they have eight-hour study sessions in his bedroom on Saturdays after synagogue; eventually she feels a kinship with him, like they are the same in some way unknowable, and this is how she’s sure she has feelings for him; eventually, sitting on his plaid bedspread, calculus in her lap and Marlowe in his, Drew asks to kiss her, and Annie lets him. The very first thing she thinks is, _kissing is weird_. The second is that she can’t quite figure out how to angle her face so that her nose isn’t pressed completely into his cheek because, as it is, it’s hard to breathe, and she has to stop every few seconds just to inhale. She apologizes; she’s new to this. _It’s okay_ , he says, he’s new to this, too. He puts his hands in her big, bushy hair (she asked for a straightener for Hanukkah, fully expecting she won’t get it; maybe one day she’ll get to be that girl she caught a glimpse of in Marisol de la Garza’s bedroom). After a few minutes he asks if she can put it in a ponytail or something, because it’s getting in the way.

Two weeks later he asks her if he can change his relationship status on Facebook. She waits another week before changing hers.

Every other Friday, she gets a present from Portia in Study Hall.

Annie has sex with Drew on Saturday, May 16th, which they’d both deliberately scheduled to celebrate the end of AP testing. Whatever downtime she finds between exams ( _ha_ ) she spends researching, taking in so much information it overwhelms her, it makes her sick. She does what she can to prepare, but sitting on the carpeted floor of his walk-in closet, folding her cardigan and dress into a neat pile by the door, her boyfriend folding in on himself, all wiry limbs, like he doesn’t want her to look at him— she feels like she might not ever be prepared.

She takes off her own bra so he doesn’t have to do it. He’s afraid to touch her, afraid to let her touch him, and she will never admit out loud that she’s endlessly grateful for his trepidation.

Anyway, it hurts, because neither of them can get comfortable enough to relax, and he turns his face away so he doesn’t have to look at her, so she won’t notice the tears taking root in his eyes; if only he knew just how desperately she wants to cry, too, if only she could summon the moisture.

They stop after five minutes. Neither one of them finishes. Drew drives Annie home, some implicit agreement made never to speak of this again. They go on two more dates, and then they break up.

And it’s just as well that they break up— it’s convenient, actually, because now she can devote her entire energy to studying for her impending finals, and graduation, and how she could possibly survive the summer without regular Adderall deliveries at school, and how she would even go about finding a new dealer at Boulder in the fall.

Portia doesn’t come to school the Friday before finals begin and Annie nearly passes out in Study Hall, panic gripping her so tight she can’t breathe. She shoots Portia a Facebook message that contains nothing but a row of question marks, and nearly an hour later she’s instructed to come to Portia’s house, like Annie Edison can really just walk into Portia Nguyen-Fleming’s house.

She does it anyway, despite how supernaturally wrong it feels. Annie’s only been here the one time before; beyond the sense memories of claustrophobia and spilled beer, it looks so grand and lonely in the daylight.

Annie’s phone buzzes: _treehouse_.

She makes her way out to the backyard and up the rope ladder and she sits down in front of Portia, who’s got her phone in one hand and a purple glass pipe in the other. Annie tucks her legs up under herself, fishes her wallet from her backpack, counts out the appropriate tender. Portia exhales a long stream of smoke out the small window. She offers Annie the pipe.

“Want some?”

Annie shakes her head. “I just want my meds so I can focus.”

“All right,” she says, and then: “Heard you dumped what’s-his-face.”

“Oh. Yeah, um,” Annie says, trying her very hardest to stamp out any visible terror she feels at the prospect that anyone like Portia would have heard about that and then _asked her about it_. “I decided I didn’t need the distraction.”

“No distractions. Huh.”

“What?”

Portia shrugs. “Nothing. You’re just, like, the single most uptight person I’ve ever met.”

“I am _not_ uptight,” Annie rebukes. For some reason, this stings. “I’m just incredibly regimented. And the Adderall helps with that.”

“The Adderall. Right.” She tosses a Ziploc bag full of pills at Annie; it’s much heavier than usual.

Annie examines the bag. She frowns. “This is— this is a lot. I don’t have this kind of money…”

“Don’t worry about the extra,” Portia says, surprisingly nonchalant. “It’s finals.”

They sit there, quiet, just looking at each other for a handful of moments that seem to stretch on into infinity. Finally, Annie thanks Portia, presses payment into her hand, takes her pills, and climbs back down the rope ladder.

On Monday morning, faced with a Biology exam and so many words that she can’t connect to their meanings, Annie looks at her surplus of unmarked medicine and takes five.

* * *

Five.

This just might be the worst day of Annie Edison’s life, and she’s had enough bad days that no calendar can contain them all.

She doesn’t know how long it will take to get used to living above Dildopolis. She doesn’t know how long it will take to get used to seeing the certificate of completion she received upon leaving rehab hung up on the fridge right next to her honorary high school diploma. She doesn’t know how long it will take to get used to commuting every day to Greendale Community College, when in another life she’d be sitting through Freshman Orientation at Boulder right now with a spunky new roommate and weekly Hillel meetings. She doesn’t know how long it will take to get used to Spanish 101 and her new study group and Troy Barnes looking her dead in the eye for the first time in years— maybe _ever_ — and exclaiming, for the whole library to hear, _You’re Little Annie Adderall!_

Most of her hopes it’s soon. The rest of her hopes she never gets used to it, hopes none of it lasts that long.

Anyway, she hates knowing that Troy can see her, that he can know her. She hates that she can’t leave high school behind and truly start anew. She’ll never be anything other than Little Annie Adderall, than bushy hair and glasses and braces, than her breaking point broadcast to everyone she’d ever met. So for Troy to expose her like this, in front of the only people who might ever have known her as anything else? Yeah, this is the worst day of Annie’s life.

In any case, there’s more than just Troy she has to contend with: Jeff Winger is too suave for his own good; Shirley Bennett is gentle and kind and condescending; Abed Nadir is… unreadable; Pierce Hawthorne is, frankly, disgusting in practically every way; and then there’s Britta Perry. Britta Perry is the coolest girl Annie has ever met. She’s so worldly and well-intentioned, jaded in that she’s seen it all but it hasn’t made her bitter. She looks like Elisabeth Shue. She was in the fucking Peace Corps, and now she’s at Greendale Community College, and, well, that makes Annie feel a hell of a lot better about her own circumstances.

(There’s a vitriol in the way Pierce calls Britta a lesbian sometimes, an accusation, and while they may scowl and tell him to shut up, nobody—  _nobody_ — expresses the kind of outrage Annie feels that maybe they should. As it is, she stamps down her rage when the rest of them fail to react. Like she said, Pierce is disgusting in practically every way, and she feels wretched in his company.)

One day, Abed makes a movie. His fictionalized Annie and Jeff kiss. Shirley takes this as gospel— and why shouldn’t she? If Abed can analyze patterns in their behavior and make predictions based on what he’s observed, and he predicts that she and Jeff will kiss for some reason, well… It isn’t until it’s pointed out to her that Annie starts to notice a certain anxiety in her gut whenever Jeff smiles in her direction (shark-like, she used to think, all teeth; shark-like, she used to think, if he stops moving he will die; shark-like, she used to think, full to the brim with a voracious hunger that may never be quelled). It isn’t the first time something like this has happened: in sixth grade, Hannah Novak once pulled Annie aside at recess to tell her just how obvious it was that she had a crush on John Dunn, and Annie turned scarlet and asked, panicked, _It is?_ and Hannah nodded, and once it was brought to her attention it solidified into truth with such severity that it became physically painful for her to even be in the same room as John. This is just how Annie _is_ with crushes: so obvious that everyone else can recognize it long before the realization ever comes to her itself. Abed has deduced that Annie has a crush on Jeff. So far, Abed has yet to be wrong.

This seems to be in conflict with her long-standing crush on Troy, but she tries not to think about that. She also tries not to think about the fact that Jeff is _literally_ double her age— because they’re all in Community College, they’re all in Spanish 101, they’re all in the same situation and that makes them equals, right? Right?

Annie recruits Jeff for the Debate Team. They flirt while they study— not that Annie’s ever been good at flirting, or had any real practice, but Jeff gets a little flustered when she takes her hair out of its clip, and she has Abed’s movie unfailingly projected in the back of her mind the entire time. Later, in the face of defeat (the weight of the Academic Decathlon pressing at her shoulders), she takes Jeff’s face in her hands and kisses him, kisses him with everything that she has. Eventually, she stops being able to tell where the euphoria of victory ends and the wish fulfillment begins.

Annie doesn’t forget that Britta kissed him first, that their entire study group was only formed because Jeff wanted to get into Britta’s pants (who can blame him? She looks like Elisabeth Shue). By some bastardization of the transitive property, then, Annie could potentially claim that she and Britta have now kissed. But she won’t.

Besides, Britta only kissed Jeff to help him pass Professor Whitman’s class, and she immediately started dating Vaughn (Vaughn is… cute, Annie decides, _cute_ — precious, even— cute, the way he walks around barefoot and shirtless, the little songs he sings, the poems he writes; she understands what had endeared him to Britta), and the fact that Jeff inadvertently broke them up doesn’t mean anything.

So Annie kisses Jeff, and she likes it, and that’s that.

She’s grateful for the distance granted by the winter break, even though she spends close to the entirety of her downtime between semesters alone in her apartment above Dildopolis— they had offered a Christmas discount on _stocking stuffers_ , which Annie graciously declined. Nevertheless, it’s good to have some time to reset. It’s good to finally put Troy solidly in the “friend” category. It’s good to get over high school infatuation. It’s good to have time to settle with the fact that her kiss with Jeff was purely strategic, and how stupid it had been to pin any other meaning onto it.

She comes back to campus refreshed, a person new, giddy to reunite with her friends, even giddier still to know that she is hiding in her pocket a text-delivered invitation to dinner with Vaughn.

He calls her _mountain flower_. He teaches her hacky-sack. This makes Britta furious; this makes Jeff furious; Annie doesn’t pretend not to have noticed.

(There’s something kind of salacious in knowing; Annie feels almost _perverse_ for delighting in it, but she does, she loves this. She loves knowing they’re watching, and she loves knowing it’s gotten under their skin, and she loves knowing there’s nothing they can do about it. Annie found a boy who goes out of his way to sing that he likes her nose, and Jewish women aren’t often told their noses are things lovable, and it isn’t Annie’s fault if Jeff and Britta are _jealous_ — in fact, she prefers it that way. Let them be jealous. Let them be bitter, and angry, and resentful. Let them covet. Let her happiness sting. They deserve all the spite she can throw at them.)

Annie and Vaughn are in love. They’re in love. She knows this because he asks her to move to Delaware with him, and she says _yes_ without hesitation, even though she has never been east of the Mississippi. She and Vaughn are going to make a life together on the East Coast, and Hospital Administration will certainly pay enough to support his pursuing a career in hacky-sack, because who is she to stifle his dreams? That’s what she loves about him: he’s a dreamer, where she has always been a meticulous planner. She has never been spontaneous in her life. She’s perfectly content to be spontaneous with Vaughn, because he is so full of childlike wonder, and it isn’t a big deal that she infantilizes him in her mind, because it’s easier to think of him as a _boy_ than as a _man_. That isn’t her fault. It’s not her fault and it’s not her responsibility to confront. As it turns out, a lot of things aren’t Annie’s responsibility— including her friends’ feelings. They’ll figure out quickly enough that she’s gone for good, and not just for the summer, and by then she’ll be well-settled into her new life. These people have been fun, this place has been fun. But she’s an adult now (she reminds herself of this often, for in repetition is truth). She’s a grown, nineteen-year-old woman. She can make her own decisions. And she decides to follow Vaughn to Delaware.

She also decides to tell Jeff, and she decides not to examine that decision. Does that make it harder to leave cleanly, stealthily, with no baggage? Sure. But she needs someone to know. She needs _Jeff_ to know. She needs him to feel the weight of her loss. She needs him to hurt for letting her go. She needs him to want her to stay, to _beg_ her to stay.

She needs him to convince her to stay.

They’re halfway to the airport when the sickness catches up with her, the inherent and unnamable _wrongness_ of a life alone with Vaughn. The idea repulses her, scares her. For the first time in a full calendar year she feels panic grip her so tightly she can’t breathe, its claws sinking into her throat, its weight bearing down on her chest like if it applies enough pressure her ribs will puncture her lungs. She very nearly cries. _Anything but this_ , she finds herself thinking, finds herself tasting like vomit in the back of her throat. _Anything but this_.

She meets Jeff outside the Transfer Dance, suitcase in tow.

“Greendale is where I belong,” she tells him.

He kisses her. It is infinitely less wrong than the car in which she sat less than half an hour ago, and any residual wrongness can be attributed to the lingering spectre of her escape, so it must be right. It must be. He kisses her. It must be, and so it is.

It’s all she thinks about. For the entire summer, it consumes her, ravages her so wholly that it _becomes_ her. Annie Edison in her entirety is the taste of Jeff Winger, his cologne, his stubble. She is the press of his lips, his tongue, his hands on her back and her neck and her face— everywhere, his hands, everywhere. It’s kind of sick.

At least, it feels sick. Every few days, when she slows down enough to breathe, she gives herself ten minutes to feel wretched and insidious and _sick_ before she stomps it back down because it’s Jeff, of course it is, it’s Jeff.

He emails her about _discretion_. Her agreement is hollow. Digitized text gives nothing away.

Coming back to Greendale is surreal, to say the least.

There’s a minute where it looks like Britta won’t be coming back, and the disappointment spoils any excitement Annie had previously felt about reuniting with her friends. It won’t be the same without Britta; Britta is their group’s fire, their fighter, their cynical idealist. Nobody else can fill that role— Abed could step up and try (probably will) for a few days, but the fun would wear off all too soon, and he’s much more comfortable where he already exists.

And then Britta emerges from the study room sofa, and Annie can put her anxiety back to rest where it belongs: wondering what, exactly, the _fuck_ anthropology is.

Anyway, the halls and cafeteria are teeming with women professing their devotion to Britta Perry, who made a martyr of her dignity for the betterment of all of womankind: _Jeff Winger, I love you_. They chant it in practiced unison, their rallying cry, fanatic. Something despicable churns in Annie’s gut; what it is, she cannot name.

Jeff takes it upon himself to best Britta at her own game. They kiss, all tongue, revolting, eight inches from Annie’s face.

Abed, never to be outdone, dubs this a “wedding episode.” Annie may faint.

It, like all things, quickly devolves into chaos.

“How long did it take for you to kiss Jeff after I told him I loved him? First Vaughn, now Jeff? I’d better not smile at that wall outlet, or you’ll fry your tongue off!”

See, the worst thing about all this is its truth. If it were some baseless accusation, sure, it would hurt, but ultimately Annie would be able to brush it off, because Britta says lots of things when she’s upset, lots of things she doesn’t mean. She lashes out; it’s her nature. But this? This brands itself, searing hot, into her skin. She can pretend all she wants that she hasn’t put her hands on Vaughn’s abs and thought, _Britta’s hands have been here, too_. She can pretend all she wants she hasn’t wondered if Jeff’s kisses overwhelmed Britta as much as they’d overwhelmed her.

Britta says lots of things when she’s angry, lots of things she doesn’t mean. Britta reaches inside Annie’s gut, digs around for her shame, lays it bare on the study room table for all to see. Britta Perry, hurting, vulnerable, frenzied: the coolest girl Annie has ever met.

Week one, and winter break cannot come quickly enough.

And come it eventually does. By then she’s more than sick of this will-they-won’t-they nonsense with Jeff; it’s tedious. Either he wants to be with her or he doesn’t; either she’s too young or she isn’t. Not that having seventeen years on her is a big deal, or anything, because they’re supposed to be _equals_ , remember? Regardless, she’s tired. She needs time away. She gets it, and then some: enter Rich.

Rich is everything Jeff could be if he weren’t so proud. Rich is intellectual and caring and philanthropic; she searches desperately for fault in him and finds none; he makes her feel safe, and safe in the assumption that nothing could ever happen between the two of them because she is so wrong in her brain and he is so right in the universe. She needs his light to balance Jeff’s darkness. She campaigns to add him to the study group.

Jeff’s protests are _delicious_. The angrier he gets, the bolder she becomes: in pushing his buttons, she pushes her boundaries. He tells her relationships are complicated. She asks Rich on a date.

 _No_ , Rich says, _you’re too young_ , Rich says, _I could be your father_ , Rich says, and she doesn’t bother to tell him that, no, her father is a balding Jewish man with chronic back pain and a severe peanut allergy. Anyway, he goes home, and somewhere in the disappointment she remembers to feel is a warm, shining nugget of relief.

So it goes.

Britta’s new friend is a lesbian, until she isn’t.

There’s something kind of gross about the fact that Britta _only_ hangs out with Page because she thinks Page is a lesbian, and there’s something even grosser about having to keep secret the knowledge that Page is only hanging out with Britta because she thinks _she’s_ a lesbian. They’re both so desperate to appear tolerant they don’t stop to be concerned that they’re tokenizing (and, really, Britta, of all people, should know better— what happened to revolution?). They don’t stop to be concerned that they’re stereotyping. They don’t stop to ask any questions, and how good of friends could they possibly be if they never talk, if they don’t know anything about each other?

Pierce heckles them at the Valentine’s dance, points at them and shouts, the boy who cried lesbian. In response, Britta kisses her. Britta kisses Page in the middle of the cafeteria, like she can permanently end homophobia with this one act. Annie recoils. Annie stares, and hates that she’s staring, feels voyeuristic and rude, feels like she’s seeing something she shouldn’t, feels like she’s reacting all wrong. (She finds herself thankful Jeff isn’t here, for once, thankful he doesn’t get this to make fun of and then masturbate to like it doesn’t make him a hypocrite, thankful because he doesn’t deserve this— whatever this is.) So Britta kisses Page, and it’s fine. Two straight girls kiss, and it’s fine. They’re fine.

Five minutes later, Page storms out of the dance: “I never thought you were cool. I only thought you were a lesbian.”

(Britta Perry is the coolest girl Annie has ever met.)

Britta’s hurt. Annie steps up to comfort her.

“Page is straight,” Britta tells her.

Annie tries her best to feign surprise, she does, but she’s never been a very good actor, and her “Really?” comes out sounding more like pity than anything else.

Britta nods.

“Well, when she was gay,” Annie offers, “I thought it was really cool of you to make out with her.”

“Thanks, Annie,” Britta says, and she means it with her whole heart, and she pulls Annie into a tight hug. It’s nice.

They get one full second before some schmuck shouts, “Come on, kiss her!”

They both look at him in disgust. Britta even scoffs.

Britta turns back to looking at Annie, still wrapped up in her arms. She shakes her head a little bit. Annie, confused and tender in ways she cannot name, leans in.

“Annie!” Britta jolts her.

No? No. Not like this.

* * *

One.

Looking at Annie Kim is like looking into a funhouse mirror. She one-ups Annie in class, and Annie gives her a big smile and a thumbs up, and loathing gnarls in her gut as she turns her attention back to Professor Cligoris. Annie resolves to best Annie Kim, or befriend Annie Kim (whichever comes first), no matter what.

She corners Annie Kim after class.

Well, okay, _corners_ makes it sound bad. Really, Annie just stops her on the way out, walks backwards in front of her while she tries to get to wherever it is she goes when she isn’t showing off just how much she knows.

“Annie?” she says. “Hi. I’m, um, I’m also Annie.” And she holds out her hand to be shaken.

Annie Kim raises her eyebrows ever-so-slightly. “Oh? That’s cute.” If she sees Annie’s hand, she makes no attempt to reach for it. And so it returns to match its partner on the straps of her backpack.

Annie Edison giggles, a little bit, all full of nervous energy; she’s never been good at meeting new people. “I really liked your answer in class today. About Germany? It was… eloquently put.”

“Mm.” Annie Kim tilts her head to the side. “Is there anything you need from me?”

“Oh, no! I just thought it was strange that we’ve somehow never met! I feel like you and I might, I don’t know, have a lot in common!”

Annie Kim considers this, lets her eyes graze over Annie Edison’s body, her pinned-back hair, her blue cardigan, her floral dress, her ballet flats. She smiles.

Annie brings Annie Kim around to meet the study group; announces that they had the same GPA in high school; gets caught up, for just a moment, in a feverish battle to be the better Annie, the more impressive Annie; accidentally-on-purpose invites her to join the Model UN club she’d been thinking about starting but never mentioned because she hadn’t had the chance to ask her friends if it were actually a good idea or not. Annie Kim declines, then leaves. Annie Edison slides into her seat at the table, her cheeks sore from smiling so much. Look at her new friend: isn’t she cool?

Troy points out that they seem too competitive to be _friends_. Annie feigns confusion (“I’m not competing with her! I find her… adorable! She’s like a younger me,”), but she is so grateful for some other name to give this feeling, so grateful for the word _competition_ because it sounds so much more neutral than _jealousy_. Trying to one-up her sounds so much more neutral than trying to _impress_ her, because why should she want Annie Kim’s approval? Why should she want Annie Kim to be impressed with her? Why should it ever matter if Annie Kim admires her or not?

As it turns out, “wherever it is Annie Kim goes when she isn’t showing off just how much she knows” is to Professor Cligoris’ office to found a Model UN club. This is fine! This is _fine_. Really, it’s fine. Annie _loves_ that Annie Kim liked her Model UN idea enough to steal it. That means that Annie Kim thinks Annie’s ideas are _valuable_ , that they’re good, that they have merit. She likes them so much that she wants to put her own name on them, as similar as those names may be. And that’s fine! That’s fine.

Jeff storms into Cligoris’ classroom, Annie on his heels. He’s going to embarrass her.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand your relationship here. Is he your father or your lover?”

 _We’re friends_ , Jeff says. Annie would like nothing more than to vomit.

Anyway, Model UN implodes.

Jeff preaches to her, the way he always does: “Listen, when you really hate someone the way you hate Annie Kim— or when you feel the way I feel about you, the easy loophole through the creepiness and danger is to treat them like a child. ‘A chip off the old block, you’re the best, kiddo!’ It’s a crutch. It’s a way for me to tell you how important you are from a distance. But now you’re becoming this mature, self-possessed, intelligent young woman, and I can’t keep patting you on the head or talking down to you.”

She tells him she likes the relationship they have as it is, that she doesn’t want to grow up if it means changing their dynamic.

“Well, tough, Annie.” He says. “Can’t keep doing this forever, _kiddo_ ,” he says.

“Can’t we?”

And because he’s Jeff Winger he cannot read her intended meaning, cannot see that if the choice is between _lover_ and _father_ she’d much rather he infantilize her, because she never feels more disgusting than when she’s kissing him, never feels more wretched, more exploited, more preyed upon than when he makes passes at her. She never feels more uncomfortable in her body. She never feels more like she would love not to be seen. She never feels more like she misses her old life, where all she had to do to avoid treacherous men was never cross the street by herself.

_Can’t we?_

“Nope! I can’t, no.”

“Nope. That’s gross. I feel gross.”

A weight is lifted.

They win.

It takes three days, but eventually Annie Kim corners Annie after class. Well, okay, _corners_ makes it sound bad. Really, she just stands next to Annie at her desk so she can’t get up.

“I wanted to congratulate you on a match well won,” she says. It clearly pains her to do so. “I really thought we’d clinched victory when you threw a tantrum, but you came back with a strategy I couldn’t have prepared for. It caught me off-guard. I’m sorry I underestimated you.”

Annie smiles. “Aw! Thank you. That… somehow means a lot to me.”

Annie Kim shifts her weight a little bit before continuing: “I also wanted to apologize for what I said about, erm, your tall friend. Whatever his name is.”

“Jeff?”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I care what his name is.”

For some reason, this makes Annie laugh.

“It’s okay,” Annie says. “You were right, anyway. About the whole, ‘Is he your lover or your father?’ thing. It was weird.”

“Forgive me if this is out of line, but I kept wondering why you haven’t just told him you’re a lesbian yet.” Annie Kim says. “I’d think he might finally back off if he knew.”

Annie frowns. A lesbian? Where did she get _that_ idea? “Oh, I’m— I’m not—”

“Oh!” Annie Kim takes the slightest step backwards. “You’re not? I’m sorry, I just assumed— Seeing you with that guy— Jeff?— Seeing you with him, it just reminded me a lot of my old compulsory heterosexuality days, and you said we had so much in common, I guess I misinterpreted.”

“No, no, I’m— I’m straight.” Annie shakes her head. “Are— are _you_ a, um, a lesbian?”

Annie Kim scoffs, a little bit. “Annie. Look at me. I’m dressed like a twee librarian who crochets scarves for cats and keeps succulents. Of course I’m a lesbian.”

Annie looks at Annie Kim’s outfit, her pink button-down blouse, her floral pencil skirt, her Mary Janes: a funhouse mirror.

“No,” she says, “I’m not. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Annie Kim says. “It’s my fault for— anyway. Have a nice weekend.”

She rushes out of the room before Annie can say anything else.

Annie goes home feeling grossly perpendicular.

She feels like a child typing _compulsory heterosexuality_ into Google. Why should it matter? It isn’t her, anyway, it isn’t for her. She feels stupid and young and ignorant.

She stays in bed most of the weekend. She tries watching a couple coming out videos on YouTube, but it feels wrong, so she stops. She thinks about Drew, mostly, how she’d felt like she and he were the same in some way and mistook that for attraction, how her gut constricted when he announced on Facebook that he was gay. She thinks about that dream she used to have in middle school where Nina would fall in love with her. She thinks about Britta. She thinks about Britta kissing Page. She thinks about Vaughn, about moving to Delaware. She thinks about Troy, the safe, unattainable boy she could pin all her high school anxiety onto, all the panic she felt in becoming his friend. She thinks about Rich. She thinks about Jeff, and Jeff, and Jeff, and Jeff, and Jeff. She thinks about Annie Kim.

She tries again with the YouTube videos. She reads a lot of blogs. She says the word _lesbian_ out loud. She says it a lot. She says it with every different inflection she can think of. She says it just to say it, just to feel it on her tongue, just to roll it around in her mouth like marbles. She chews on it. It’s a long weekend.

It isn’t some grand revelation, lightning striking the earth, suddenly now she sees the world and herself with fresh eyes. It isn’t like that. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t search out pictures of beautiful women just to hate herself and feel perverse. More than anything there is just language to describe things she has always felt, things obtuse, things she could intentionally ignore. Annie likes having language; it keeps her grounded.

She has no idea when or how she’ll tell the study group, if it’s even their right to know, if it’s worth it to her to field invasive questions from Pierce every chance he gets. Maybe she’ll get around to it eventually. For now she just sits.

She grabs Annie Kim’s arm as they leave class on Monday. Annie Kim seems surprised.

“Um— hi. I… Well, I thought about— y’know— that thing you said? Last week?” Annie chews on her lip. For all the thinking she did, she never quite got this far.

“Okay…” Annie Kim says.

Annie can feel herself getting flustered, her skin hot, her face surely red. She says, “There’s this new Mexican place that just opened up near my apartment. Would you, maybe, wanna… have dinner with me?”

Annie Kim blinks a couple times, and then she smiles. “I think that would be very agreeable.”

“Oh, great! Um. Does tonight work? How does seven sound?”

“It’s a date.”

Annie lets go of Annie Kim’s arm, embarrassed that she’d forgotten she was even holding it. Annie Kim walks away.

Annie has no clue how she’s possibly going to hide this from her friends, and, truly, she does a terrible job. Somehow, miraculously, she manages to distract them with actual studying (it’s amazing how infrequently that happens).

Annie Kim arrives at 6:59, because of course she does (never mind that Annie herself has been here for half an hour already). They keep the conversation light. They both get quesadillas. Annie tries not to think about how weird it is to be out with a girl who shares her name, putting aside the novelty of being _out_ with a girl at all. She tries not to think that maybe she’s rushing into things, maybe she should have settled into this whole thing for a while before asking anybody out. She tries not to think that she’s doing it wrong, that Annie Kim pities her, that it’s going really poorly and she just can’t tell. She tries to make her brain shut up.

Anyway, it’s three hours later when they finally leave. Annie Kim says she’d like to see Annie again sometime. They make plans to see a guest lecture about the Large Hadron Collider on Friday night.

It’s another four dates after that before Annie Kim asks if she can kiss her.

Annie says yes.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on tumblr @ ladykima
> 
> also I kind of rushed through the last part to get it done on time, and I feel like I probably botched the not-quite-coming out. I know it's a lot more complicated than that.
> 
> a lot of these experiences were dramatized from my own life, but not all of them, so if I've handled something poorly or incorrectly, please let me know! I'd like to be able to fix it, or at least to do better in the future.


End file.
